New law eases way for crisis workers to provide care after disasters

With Gov. Bobby Jindal's signature, Louisiana has become the 10th state to enact a law that makes it easier for medical workers to cross state lines to provide help after a disaster.

The Uniform Emergency Volunteer Health Practitioners Act provides interstate recognition of licenses held by medical professionals who volunteer during emergencies, helping to ensure more organized and available medical support, advocates say.

Approved recently by the Legislature, the act allows Louisiana to receive assistance from medical professionals from nine other states. Medical workers from Louisiana could, in turn, assist with care during emergencies in the other listed states.

Professionals covered by the act, including doctors, nurses and mental health counselors, would be legally certified to help during a disaster -- and their exposure to potential lawsuits would be sharply limited. They would be required to sign up with the interstate compact in advance.

Limitations on liability risks would expire 30 days after the end of a declared state of emergency in the affected state. The legal protection could be extended if the state's governor decides a public health emergency persists for a longer period.

"What you have is people from neighboring states that are pre-registered come there," said Eric Fish, legislative counsel for the Chicago-based Uniform Law Commission. "It will supplement their (states') capacity to respond to disaster with trained, licensed professionals and it will get rid of the problems that came up during Katrina and Rita."

Government regulations that bar or restrict the work of medical professionals beyond the borders of their home states played a major role in limiting medical support in New Orleans after the 2005 storm. There also were major concerns at the time about the training and credentials of volunteers who appeared and tried to provide medical help.

Jullette Saussy, director of New Orleans Emergency Medical Services, who experienced first-hand the dire shortage of medical resources during and after Katrina, said the new act will make it easier for legitimate medical professionals to provide care.

"We don't need to go through a laborious paperwork process that requires multiple stages of making sure it's OK," Saussy said. "There's no time for that. People lose their lives when we are stuck doing paperwork."

After witnessing the mayhem among medical professionals in the storm zone, the Uniform Law Commission introduced multistate compact legislation. Under the act, health professionals in participating states can register to volunteer in advance -- or after an emergency has begun -- with a simple public or private registration process. They can then travel to the state suffering from the disaster and offer medical assistance, unless barred from doing so by that state's emergency managers.

Each state would establish its own pool of health volunteers by notifying medical professionals of the opportunity to register in advance and determining what types of services they can provide.

"The state remains the manager, so the governor and his emergency management offices are always going to be in control of who comes in and who doesn't come in," said Fish. "What the bill does is allow a fully stocked bullpen in times of an emergency to help out."

In addition to Louisiana, Arkansas, Colorado, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah and New Mexico have passed the act and nine additional states have introduced the legislation. Local health professionals like Saussy believe the cooperative program could be critical during another major disaster.

"One of the things that still haunts me today was the lack of help we had post-storm, just trying to help the masses of people with the very few staff that were here -- and adding to that the fact that the majority of the staff were victims of the storm as well," she said. "It was mass chaos."

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Amber Sandoval-Griffin can be reached at asandoval-griffin@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3323.